15th June 2011 Archive

For a comparatively brief period of time, hardware companies like Nokia and telco operators like AT&T ruled the mobile roost. But as they're now learning – and not doubt stewing over – software is increasingly king in mobile, just like it is on the desktop. The winning strategy in this software-centric world is one that puts software developers first.

Lawmakers in 21 states have considered bills this year that would lessen penalties for teen sexting, in which teenagers send or receive pictures of themselves in various states of undress, according to the Associated Press.

Billed as the year of the fondleslab, 2011 has so far failed to deliver on the hype. With sales of Motorola's Xoom sluggish at best, the BlackBerry Playbook too idiosyncratic for most and the Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tantalisingly conspicuous by its absence, Asus looks to steal a march on the competition with its Eee Pad Transformer TF101.

IRIS Software and Services produces packaged apps that half the UK's accountants use. But continually updating them as regulations change is a pain - so why not provide its software as a service? That's the plan that Accountancy Division CEO Phill Robinson explains to The Reg.

After Nintendo revealed the Wii U at this year's E3, a continuous stream of rumours and further details have emerged. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are all now battling for a piece of consumers' lives, evolving their respective hardware into home entertainment hubs, rather than simply gaming systems.

Peugeot has been criticised for losing the plot with its small and medium cars over the last decade, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that it has made some fine D-segment motors in the same period, including the 406 and 407.

UK credit reference and credit recovery agency creditsafe.co.uk took its site offline on Tuesday, as a precaution, following a hacking attack. The site remains offline at the time of writing on Wednesday afternoon.

The European Data Protection Supervisor has had a busy year - with a wider remit to cover all EU institutions as well as helping to write a new legal framework for data protection across the European Union.

Hitachi Data Systems is planning to provide a sophisticated content storage cloud infrastructure with end-to-end deduplication and local file servers accessing a content core having both archive and data discovery functions.

IBM was late to the Opteron 6100 party last year, behind rivals Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Acer. But Big Blue did put a compact machine in the field crammed with lots of cores, and it does want to sell them.

A software consultant in California has been sentenced to 30 years in federal prison after he embarked on a spree of armed bank robberies and amassed a huge stockpile of homemade explosives at his home, residues from which blew up and injured a local gardener and necessitated the total destruction of the building on grounds of safety.

East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust has decided that its patients do not subscribe to the Sid James school of healthcare and has ordered Babs Windsors to keep their nursely chesticles firmly under wraps.

Moscow State University has moved into the upper echelons of the HPC field with an upgrade to its top-end supercomputer and moved to hybrid CPU-GPU blade servers from indigenous supercomputer maker T-Platforms.

The HTTP Archive – a fledgling effort to record the performance of sites across the interwebs – has merged with the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine has long kept a similar record of internet content.

In the kind of report that really spoils your day, Western Australia’s Auditor-General has presented the findings of a study into that state’s government network security. The finding? Fourteen out of the 15 agencies subjected to “hostile scans” of their networks failed to notice anything amiss.

Supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics says it has shipped more than 500 of its Altix UV line of machines in the past year, perhaps a larger number than you thought was possible and possibly indicative of the benefit of selling a Xeon-based system over one based on Itanium processors.

Microsoft has announced a new technology designed to help C++ developers build massively parallel applications. Known as C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism – or C++ AMP for short – the technology will be included in the next version of the company's Visual C++ compiler, and Microsoft plans to open up the specification for others to use.